goliath

Neat idea! If you're interested in production quality high concurrency Ruby check out https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/ which can support hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections.

CRuby is multi-threaded with a GIL. CRuby also supports light-weight cooperative threads called Fibres, which are used to build things like: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/ JRuby has no GIL, JIT, and is significantly faster than BEAM.

We've had a lot of love recently for Goliath + Grape, e.g. see: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/blob/master/example... Goliath is it's own asynchronous app server, and it wraps around the nice Grape API DSL. Works really well for little projects I'd rather write in ruby than CoffeeScript + node.js

Treating bodies as IO streams is only part of the problem. Today in Rack to stream responses, the rack app returns: [-1, {}, []] Which is interpreted by the app server like Thin, EventMachine as a deferrable response. The problem with this approach is that there's no way to process response headers asynchronously. Consider: class Middleware def initialize(app) @app = app end def call(env) status, headers, body = @app.call(env) # This wouldn't work because rack returns [-1, {}, []] for an async response. if headers['Content-Type'] == 'json' Logger.info "Its JSON!" end status, headers, body end end The logger line would never evaluate because of the `[-1, {}, []]` response. The Goliath web server is the closest thing I've seen in Ruby land

Sinatra-synchrony is awesome. For those looking to do a few more advanced use-cases, like HTTP streaming upload/downloads, websockets, etc.. Take a look at Goliath: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath Same idea, em-synchrony under the hood.

Goliath has a websockets branch and also supports eventsource and streaming pretty easily. If it's something you need, definitely look into Goliath as well. http://www.igvita.com/2011/08/26/server-sent-event-notificat... https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/tree/websockets

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you want, but even as a Rubyist, I wouldn't recommend Rails for this. If user creation/editing/etc is all handled by your normal webapp and you only need a fast API endpoint, frameworks like Rails and Django are overkill. In Ruby, I'd suggest Goliath, instead: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/ I'm not into PHP but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to build a scalable, efficient separate API app in that too.